Cards on the table, gang: I’ve spent most of the last 18 months off my tits on painkillers. Not to a Jacko/Prince/stomach-pump degree, but enough to take the edge off my do-gooding and let evil have its way with the world. It’s no coincidence I was out of it when Brexit Brexitted and Trump trumped, when white supremacists showed their faces again, when Nazis rebranded and all manner of clusters were fucked. It’s been like Bane taking over Gotham after Batman got stuck down that well. As Edmund Burke once said, the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to knacker their spines and chug handfuls of gabapentin.

But even in my diminished state I need to get back involved in the world, see through the grogginess and fog that surrounds me, ignore the 40-strong male choir in the corner and the unicorns firing rainbows out of their eyes. There’s do-gooding to be done-gooded. People, it’s time for a Zero-patented, guilt-ridden, non-Scientologist audit!

Onto veggieness. Even in the fog of my lost weekend I’ve not strayed from the righteous path of vegetarianism for the delicious path of actual flavour. I’ve not eaten a single piece of meat, fish or fowl, not even accidentally during one of those unfortunate overseas mix-ups I fucking live for. But I’ve got slack on checking beer and wine for isinglass because it’s a pain in the balls, and all my beloved painkillers will have been tested on animals and have often come in gelatine capsules. And while I’ve made a kind of peace with how the pharmaceutical industry rolls it’s a fractious, uneasy peace like you’d find between Star Wars trilogies. I also lean heavily on dairy, cramming eggs and cheese and milk into my facehole with no regard for how chickens and cows are treated once I’m done with them, knowing it’s unlikely to be gently. Maybe it’s time to take a couple more steps towards the living hell of veganism. On veggieness, let’s say eight Zero points and only a light flogging to my second-numbest finger.

Next, the big fat mess of global inequality, gender inequality, and the effects of big bidness and the rough end of capitalism. Here I’ve done embarrassingly little. I quit donating to Care International and Water Aid to redirect money elsewhere. It was to another charity but that does nothing to the mustard, let alone cut it. I’ve kept up with Kiva but feel no less conflicted about the ethics and usefulness of microfinance loans. I’ve smashed a bit of the patriarchy in working with perpetrators and survivors of domestic violence, but there’s still plenty of it in need of a smashing. Again, these things have become so embedded in my life and retreated so close to token gestures they no longer feel active with a capital A and an ism. Here I’m getting no Zero points, four thorough floggings and a half membership of the Young Conservatives. I need to do more. People, let’s make a start!

And yes, I had a failed comeback in January ‘14 where I did one entry and fucked off out of it. And yes, I had a second failed comeback in June ‘16 where I did two entries and fucked off out of it. But this will be different, this will be both lasting and meaningful, both gabba and pentin, and when next we meet I’ll turn my audit into goals, and goals into plans, and plans into revolution, and bit by bit we’ll edge this species towards basic decency. I will do this! I will do all of this and more! Or none of it, or less.

You’ll recall I’ve often said you’ll recall us banging on about the bedroom tax, the government’s effort to reduce the housing benefit bill by giving less housing benefit to people who need it. Here, people lose 14 percent of their benefit for having a spare bedroom and 25 percent for having two spare bedrooms, with the definition of spare rooms including those inhabited by children under the age of ten. It’s a quality piece of work from the people who brought you the knackering of the NHS and the deranged misery of the Atos assessments.

Back in April I joined a public meeting that was looking to get interest stirred up in fighting it. It seemed a grassroots movement was building, with local organisations springing up all over the place. They managed a decent march through the city before joining with other groups to form the Scottish Anti-Bedroom Tax Federation. I’d link to their website but they don’t appear to have one, choosing instead to fight the good fight on the frontlines of 1997. They held a rally yesterday in the centre of Glasgow, having had another march knocked back because there were already two being held that day. They aimed to get people from across the country in a whole Scotland rally, bringing a spot of unity to what risks being a fractured and fractious campaign. I joined them, making my way from Grenyarnia to Glasgow, a city in which much of my Zeroing has taken place though only by chance and not by anything that might suggest where I actually live.

I’ll be honest here, gang: it wasn’t very inspiring. There were a few thousand people making up a pretty slack crowd that drifted and thinned as the thing went on. It was all a bit repetitive, with speaker after speaker saying the same thing, all of which we agreed with but none of which we actually needed to hear. This was preaching very slowly and very repetitively to the choir. And if the point was publicity and a decent crowd photo, there’s not much online today to suggest they got either. Plus there was this guy:

He’s a pretty serious anarchist, him. He’s a dangerous subversive. You can tell because of that comic book he’s read and/or film he’s seen. He needs that mask. He can’t have the pigs identifying him, not with the anti-establishment way he holds his placard at peaceful, legally-organised rallies. He’s probably heard of 4Chan! He’s probably hacked Anonymous! Bless his heart.

But there was also anger and, if not a sense of renewed momentum, then at least a sense that this thing is still going even if it’s stalled a little. The thing is the bedroom tax affects hundreds of thousands of people but they’re still only a small minority. For this thing to work we need people who aren’t affected by it to get angry and join them, for the numbers to swell and the force of momentum to become irresistible. We need a campaign that’s impassioned and organized, one that’s robust and credible and impossible to shout down or argue against or undermine or discredit with cheap shots and diversions.

Devoted as you are to yer man The Zero, and as closely as you monitor my good works, you’ll be aware I do the odd bit of fundraising in spite of hating it almost completely. The past few years I’ve been meddling with Yaknak Projects, a small charity set up by a few friends to run two children’s home in Nepal. They need £16,000 a year to keep the homes running, a delightful spot of constant pressure that cheers them greatly.

I had a plan to change how they fundraised, to reduce the effort and up the ambition a bit. First, I wanted to change the kind of events we took on and the kind of money we aimed for, going for fewer events but doing them on a bigger scale and making them repeatable year on year. Second, I wanted to up the amount brought in by regular donors, aiming towards the all-of-it mark. Third, I wanted to get some decent chunks out of grants and trusts if the first two parts of the plan didn’t cover us.

A couple of years ago we started stage one, rounding up friends, friends of friends, co-workers and co-workers’ friends to run a 10k or half marathon. We had a team of 13 aiming for about £4,000, a figure almost stupidly ambitious against what we’d had before. We got about £7,500 once we counted Gift Aid. I can’t even tell you the level of smugness I was walking around with. I’m talking Gwyneth Paltrow.

Last year we started stage two, the regular donors thing. In the world of fundraising, regular donations are the joy of joys. You ask someone for money once and they keep giving it to you month after month, and all you’ve got to do check your bank statements to see if they’ve stopped. Back before we started on this we were getting a couple of hundred a month from the trustees and a friend or two but mostly when we encouraged people to give regularly they responded by not doing that at all. We changed how we went about asking, talking up the idea of being a small band of dedicated noble types helping to keep this small charity going. People started giving and got us up to £8,500 a year, more than half our running costs. At that point, by comparison, Gwyneth was looking modest, full of doubt and insecurities.

Last year brought us down a Paltrow or two. Rerunning the runs we had a lot of people who said they’d be up for it didn’t bother. We ended up with fewer runners and a lot less cash, coming out with about £3,500; a top-five fundraiser but disappointing against the first year. And there’s no Plan B with this stuff, there’s no one writing cheques if we don’t bring in the cash. It’s just us.

This week I got started on the third, hopefully still annual, big fundraiser. Here we’re looking to get people running again but also figuring ways to get lazier types to do something they’re at least halfway up for. So far we’ve nicked the idea of feeding yourself for a pound a day from whichever charity thought it up first, and added the Daal Bhat Challenge where, like a native Nepali, you have to eat curry and rice three times a day for a week. The trick is now to find people who can be bothered doing this and get them to do it, and find people who can’t be bothered and see if we can get them to do it too. The trick is then to find people who want to give us money and have them give it to us, and find people who want to keep their money and see if we can take at least a little from them.

There’s a brutal bit of maths here. We need £7,500. If we set a realistic average of £150 sponsorship per entrant, excluding Gift Aid, we need about 40 people. They’d put us to £6,000, with Gift Aid taking us to £7,500. We’ve got four trustees plus me who have basically no choice about doing this, and four people who’ve already signed to triathlons and half marathons. That leaves us with 31 people to recruit. We’ve got 13 people from the past two years we can ask, some of whom might be interested. That leaves us with a minimum of 18 new people to find. And we’re not the Race for Life, we can’t go putting up posters on subways or adverts on TV. This is ambitious for us. This is pressure. This is an assload of consequences just waiting.

The thing with fundraising is you have to dress it up like it’s fun. You have to be all positive and win people over with charm and enthusiasm and flattery. I have to put aside the panic and the maths that keeps me awake. Trying to get money from people, I tell them how much good it’s going to do. What keeps me awake is the opposite of that. It’s the absence of their money and the bad things its absence will do. If we don’t bring in this cash what’ll happen is we don’t pay rent on the boys’ houses and we don’t buy them food. We take them out of school and out of the houses and put them back in the orphanages they were living in before, in the orphanages where 150 children cram in together. We will fail them completely. We need to get this money.

That whooshing noise you just heard was the sound of my sphincter closing shut.

If you’ve trawled around the other parts of The Zero you’ll know all about how I got into this do-gooding lark. How I got sick of my cynicism and naysaying, how I quit ranting about problems and turned my attention to their causes and solutions. How I got all up on futurism and how if we’re not working to a better world we’re keeping it back. How my indifference turned gradually to… difference, which is the opposite of that. That doesn’t sound right.

It was that sort of thinking that attracted me to social work. From the outside it seemed like it had the potential to change people, to get them away from things doing them harm or turn them from lousy decisions. It looked like maybe it could get stuck into the things around them, the systems and structures and powers that ruin lives and keep them ruined and keep the generations after them ruined. I was looking for a job to help bring change to people and to society at large and to the generations lined up ahead of ours. I was looking for a job that would teach people to fish. Or farm beancurd, which would be more in keeping with my strict vegetarian principles. That sort of thinking was all the rage in the right-on ‘70s and Thatchered ‘80s, radical social work saying everything was shit but would get sorted. Talk to people practising back then you’d think they split their time between getting down and dirty in people’s homes and getting placardy on the streets, with the occasional ten minutes in the office. You’d think they actually believed they could have a part in changing the world, like they had a chance going up against the causes of poverty instead of just looking on and handing out cash for nappies. Looking back, it seems like social work was part of a philosophy. That’s not how it feels right now, not in my office.

There, most of the talk is around fake tans and football and almost-famous nobodies in nothing magazines. There’s barely an ounce of politicking around the place, nothing in the way of morality or agenda. I’m not saying there’s not room for chat or silliness or dicking around in the workplace but I’d like a touch of principle now and again. There’s one guy into this stuff but for most people it’s very definitely just a job. It’s a job they care about, like they care about the people they’re working with, like they care about doing it well. They know it matters. But it’s a job in relation to nothing bigger. That’s not how it should be. Community care workers should be bigging up disability rights and fighting benefit cuts and lousy care provision. Criminal justice workers should be bigging up progressive sentences instead of custodials we know make everything worse. People, it’s time to Zerofy the office! It’s Zero hour! I’m brainstorming catchphrases here. Let’s get Zeroiggy with it!

That last one was pretty good. First, me and this other guy will try and get some interest going in the Social Work Action Network, a progressive pressure group that looks to get social work away from managerialism and more towards right-onness. In fact maybe we’ll go and ask the team leader to pay for us to attend and if that fails maybe we’ll email the service manager two weeks ago and not hear anything back yet. Second, we’ll try and get some interest going in slagging off the bedroom tax which is about to screw over a good share of our service users. There’s a march being organized in a few cities people could take an interest in. This other guy went to a planning meeting a couple weeks back and is dragging me to the next one, and together maybe we’ll get others into it instead of just being laughed at like is happening currently. Third, to take our principles into general future-facing do-goodery, I’ll release The Mighty Gore. As before, he’ll take his inspiring and terrifying message of environmental disaster straight to the hearts of non-believers, striking fear into the hearts I mentioned earlier in this sentence. That’s just bad writing. In the first wave I’ll target the water cooler which gets through several thousand plastic cups a day, the bin in the lunch room which is filled with all manner of recyclables, and the lights in the bathrooms because things always sound punchy in threes. That’s just good writing. With these efforts combined, with this ally working alongside me, and with all the enthusiasm and drive I can muster, I’ll very quickly achieve the thing I was talking about when I started this entry last week and forgot about completely. Let’s get Zeroiggy with it!

Not infrequently have I banged on about the potential power of social networking as a force for do-goodery. Not infrequently have I banged on about the tedium of social networking in the hands of most of its users. Conflicted as I am I’m finally a big fan of Twitter, having introduced a blanket ban on friends who might want to tell the world about their old washing machines, their new washing machines or their tedious marriages. Limiting my follows to political types, right ons, social workers and general contrarians, I have a feed of wishy-washy, liberally, pinko-commie news, ideas and arguments.

There are some cracking accounts for doers of good. NoMorePage3, obviously, although to date there remains the same amount of Page 3s as there always has been (one). YesYou’reRacist, YesYou’reGaycist and YepYou’reSexist are essential public service feeds calling out racist, homophobic and sexist tweeters who protest too much, proving “I’m not racist, but” is the most nerve wracking start to any sentence ever. And there’s the Everyday Sexism project, asking female Twitterites to tweet examples of the sexist bullshit they put up with when they’d rather be going about their business unmolested; in some cases quite literally.

Everyday Sexism’s Twitter feed, website and Huffington Post blog should shut every last pie hole belonging to men who think they’re now the endangered species and women who think feminism’s a done deal. They highlight the tedious, blokey banter that’s still knocking about, the “Get in the kitchen” kind of stuff, the “Barbecuing’s a man’s job” kind of thing, the “Someone’s hormonal” kind of bollocks. They highlight the lecherous behaviour that’s still doing the rounds, the gawking at cleavage, the wolf whistling at passers by, the winking at girls and wanking on streets. They highlight the creepy, threatening behaviour that’s wrecking the place, the lascivious looks that says women are decoration, the sexualised banter that assumes they’re up for it, the stalking that says they’re property. And they highlight the everyday sexual assaults you wouldn’t believe are still happening. Every day.

Interesting as this is, you’ll naturally be wondering what effect it’s had on me, being as how I am essentially the wind beneath your wings. It’s been a revelation, a genuinely surprising account of how many men are still dragging their knuckles and how many women are hassled and bullied and scared and abused. I’m fairly sure I’m not a big lechy bastard or a big intimidating power tripper but I’ve checked some of my behaviour, I’ve had a think about how I present to women. I noticed recently, in the communal showers at the swimming pool, how Mrs Zero chose her spot carefully, avoiding the corner where she’d be between two men. When I take a spot now, I make sure I don’t create these kinds of awkward spaces for women, going next to other men unless the place is deserted and I’d come off creepy sidling up to some random wet guy. Similarly, when I go to a spin class like the middle class wanker I’m slowly becoming I avoid the bikes next to lone women in case they worry I’ll spend the class cracking onto them. I won’t, obviously, because I’m off the market, I’m not that creepy and I wouldn’t get far with this combination of face, personality and body odour but, point is, I’m more sensitive to how women might feel about behaviour that is, but might not look, entirely benign. And yes, Jeremy Clarkson will be rolling his eyes and complaining how you can’t say boo to a female goose nowadays but then if he were our template for gender politics we’d be making the world in his image, storming the WI, handing out blue jeans and cocks.

You’ll be wondering now what you can do. Women, you can share your experiences, telling other women they’re not alone and telling men to knock it the hell off. Men, you can knock it the hell off. And everyone, you can follow and like and promote Everyday Sexism and vote for it in the Shorty Awards to let more people know it’s around. Do this. Do all of this and the day will come when we won’t need this kind of project any more, when women won’t have to tweet about their experiences because they won’t be experiencing them any more. And on that day, when equity comes at last to humanity and all are free and equal, you can finally tell me about your washing machine and your marriage and whatever you’ve made in your slow fucking cooker.

As you’d expect from a man in my position, I have literally thousands of children. The groupies that gather at the foot of Zero Towers are as fertile as they are up for it, and the rise of my master race is progressing nicely. Sadly, due to the sheer size of my collective progeny, all of whom are disabled rad-fems, I am unable to support any of them financially or emotionally, thus creating twice as many social problems as I was hoping to solve. As such, I feature in the new series of Working Class Parents For You To Look Down On, starting on Wednesday on ITV2+1. It’s from the producers of Teenage Mums Deserve Everything They Get and Chavs: Scum We Simultaneously Loathe and Celebrate, so you know there’s quality there. Episode three’s an absolute hoot. Long story short, I lose an eye to toxoplasmosis.

But I digress. As any parent of a fledgling master race will tell you, nappies are incredibly expensive and massively polluting. As we speak, millions of babies’ arses are pooing into billions of environmentally disastrous disposable nappies which go on to live in landfills for decade after decade as they fail miserably to decompose. It’s hard to get decent figures on how many we’re talking about and how long they take to go but we’re maybe looking at somewhere between 3 and 8 billion every year, taking maybe 200 to 500 years to biodegrade. That’s a fairly vague estimate given the margin of error of 5 billion nappies and 300 years but that’s what you get when Defra and the Environment Agency go all non-specific on us. Point is, we are at serious risk of a future in which loveably anthropomorphic robots are forced to wade through mountains of centuries-old baby shit, seriously impeding on their ability to conduct intimate relationships and warm our hearts.

We have to make a decision if we are going to minimise the environmental impact of our babies’ bumholes. The decision is between regular single-use nappies, old fashioned cloth nappies, biodegradable single-use nappies or old fashioned cloth nappies with single-use inserts. And if we’re being realistic about things we have to factor in time, money and pains in the ass.

First, disposable nappies. They’re the default choice for our generation, with something like 90% of infant pooers pooing in them. They use up stacks of oil, paper and energy in their production and then sit in landfills and represent everything awful about our use-once, throw-away society, telling future archaeologists how wasteful we were, how short sighted and careless. But they’re handy, no denying it. They get shat in, they get binned and they get forgotten about and require no real effort or thought.

Then there are reusable cloth nappies, the kind we used until convenience and insta-disposal came along. You’d think these would be way in the lead for ethics and environmental non-destruction but it’s here the controversy and hassle kick in. A 2005 report from the Environment Agency reckoned there’s not much difference between reusables and disposables once you factor in all the water for washing, all the power for tumble drying and all the chemicals for detergenting. Much of the report was debunked by our beloved Leo Hickman, on whose enviro-teat I regularly suckle, and a later report from Defra which pointed out how changes in behaviour around resusable nappies make a hefty difference. As is fairly obvious, if you line dry rather than tumble dry and if you use environmentally friendly detergent rather than some toxic bollocks and if you use energy-efficient washing machines instead of old clunky overheating power-whores and if you use renewable energy rather than coal or veal then, obviously, the environmental impact is much, much less impactful. But resusables are more of a pain in the ass, no denying it. You have to wash them instead of throwing them out and forgetting about them, increasing the amount of time exposed to baby shit. But then that’s a lousy reason for not using them. It’s like saying you don’t buy Fairtrade because it’s marginally more expensive, or like saying you want animals tortured and killed because you like a mixed grill. There’s an ethic at work here.

There are also a number of nappies occupying the middle ground. Here we have biodegradable single-use nappies made from the likes of cotton and cornstarch which will compost away years before Wall-E ever gets his stonk on. Here too we have single-use inserts that up the convenience of cloth nappies and reduce the waste of disposables. Naturally we should hate ourselves for even thinking about them. Like old school disposables they both use energy and materials in their production that we’ll never get back and the biodegradables are said to give off methane that’s as knackering for the environment as anything Jeremy Clarkson can think of. And they’re more expensive, obviously, because there’s a premium on faddy moralising.

All of which brings us to an inconclusive conclusion based on stats as vague as my memory of most of the people I know on Facebook. Disposable nappies are awful. Cloth nappies are okay if you use them right. Degradable disposables and single-use inserts are the kinds of lousy compromises you said you’ve never make back before you sold out to The Man. I’d say go for cloth, hold your nose and cross your fingers you’re doing the right thing.

And so, with 2012 behind us and the Mayans looking like some sort of primitive culture that didn’t have everything figured out and their modern-day followers looking like some sort of bucketload of twats, one’s attention naturally turns to one’s achievements across the year and to the resolutions rushed out in the interests of filling a page.

And then there was the small matter of my new year’s resolutions, a cluster of low-rent ambitions so hastily cobbled together and even more hastily forgotten about that this paragraph’s about to get very embarrassing. First, I vowed to become a better vegetarian, something I achieved on a rather half-assed level. My left bum cheek bought some multi-vitamins to plug the gaps in my otherwise lousy diet, started snacking on nuts and seeds to actually get some protein down my neck, and cooked one or two meals using actual ingredients rather than just slinging some ready-made, mutant-looking, meat-free sludge in the oven. It’s been an okay start, the bonus being I can use the same resolution again this year. Second, I aimed to give more to charity, looking to reach about ten percent of my take-home pay once I’d battered through my colossal student debt. I’ve made similar progress there, my right bum cheek bumping up my donations to about six percent which isn’t bad considering the remaining colossalness of my colossal student debt. Third, I promised to buy the most environmentally friendly car I could manage once my old car died completely. It did, obviously, and I did an okay job of getting a half-decent replacement. I couldn’t afford anything in the way of an electric or hybrid car but I got a diesel with lower emissions that’s so far saved a couple thousand kilograms of carbon dioxide being spewed into Al Gore’s sensitive lungs. That’s a solid bit of resolutioning, that is. And fourth, I vowed to switch to an electricity supplier trading only in renewable energy. That hasn’t happened, what with the forgetting all about it and then the remembering about it but realising I couldn’t afford it yet. I’m all for paying a bit more to save the world but it’s had to be bumped to the post-debt era in what even my most loyal supporters are calling a humiliating failure of Lib Dem proportions. Still, that new set of resolutions are writing themselves, aren’t they?

So for 2013 we’ll start with the better vegetarian thing, actually learning what’s to be done with the likes of tofu, lentils, vegetables and my kitchen and turning them into edible meals. Add to that a working knowledge of yer basic nutrition and a hefty increase in protein and smugness and that’ll be me sorted. Next, the electricity thing. What with us having to be the change we wish to see in the world I’ll sign up for a more expensive but beautifully clean supplier that uses only wind, water, sunshine or human spinal fluid to power the many spy cameras I have placed around Al Gore’s bedroom. Third, the charity thing. I need to restart regular donations to the likes of Care International and WaterAid on my way to the ten percent target, showing how atheism rolls with the tithing. And fourth, I’ll aim to do my job well. That shouldn’t take a resolution but it’s easy to get worn down quickly in social work, easy to turn to them-and-us thinking, easy to drift to the right. It’s easy to forget people are products of their environments, easy to get frustrated with their inability to change, easier to blame people than the environments that made them and the systems that keep them in place. I’ll aim to keep my lefty principles intact, keep up with research to make sure what I’m doing works, and be as awesome as it’s possible to be.

I will do this. I will do all of this. In November, when I remember I wrote this whole bastard of a thing.

Generally I prefer not to write about current scandals and upsets, I prefer not to jump on media bandwagons or scrap around in tabloid hubbubs. Go too far in that direction you’ll find yourself with a site people think of as relevant, topical and interesting. But these past few weeks, with the death of Jacinta Saldanha, I’ve had suicide on my mind.

You’ll be aware how a while back a couple members of a family with a flimsy claim to an anachronistic position of limited power and unlimited privilege announced they’re expecting a baby. And how millions of nosey people with nothing in the way of class consciousness were interested. And how the media went berserk with nothing articles about how the future-sprog will one day wear the world’s most expensive hat while the rest of us go about our business. And how a couple of lame-ass DJs made a lame-ass prank call to remind us how prank calls stopped being funny about two minutes before Alexander Graham Bell was born. And how one of the nurses they called gave out a bit of information she shouldn’t have and justified the existence of every Data Protection Officer the world over and their end-of-days lecturing in every organisation everywhere. And how one of the nurses killed herself, and how the world stopped for a second and shook its head.

What does this tell us about the role of the media? About its obsession with the royal family? About prank calls and ratings-grabs and that time we upset Andrew Sachs? Nothing. It tells us nothing we didn’t know already. It’s what it tells us about life and mental health and suicide that matters. It tells us how life hangs by the thinnest of threads and how life is a pair of scissors ready to cut itself to fuck.

Suicide’s a big killer of people. The Samaritans reckon a million people around the world die every year by suicide, with more than 5,000 in the UK. That’s enough to touch most of us. I know people who’ve tried to kill themselves and I’ve known people who’ve managed it and I know people who’ve lost people. And it’s an awful shitfest of tragicness, with all the grief that comes with losing someone with added layers of guilt and failure and lost opportunities and embarrassment and feeling looked at and judged. There are reasons for suicide; mostly not the ones we imagine afterwards. Like The Samaritans say, it’s a complicated thing. It’s not often the result of a single problem, more a bunch of problems bound together. There are problems that seem unmanageable and unhappiness that seems intolerable and maybe is. But suicide’s a permanent solution to a temporary set of problems, and it seems survivors are mostly glad to find themselves alive, glad they survived the decision they made. And it’s around the decision point, when someone’s giving it serious thought, us Zeroes can get stuck in and be all awesome and life saving and that.

Like yer regular first aid, which helps save lives and fill blog entries, we have mental health first aid that teaches the art of suicide intervention. I did a course on this a few years back and a refresher a few weeks back and have had to use it once or twice. I’d be linking all over the place here so you could look into it yourself but it seems the companies who run the training would rather get paid than give out their ideas for free. This, then, comes from a memory known for being fairly lousy:

First, we have to be on the lookout for people who seem down or distant or maybe different to how they seem usually. We have to have a conversation, using a spot of tact and subtlety, to find how lousy they’re feeling. We have to ask a hard question and we have to use the S word: “Are you thinking of suicide?” Anything less than that leaves us and them open to misinterpretation. We have to ask their reasons for wanting to die, respect them and not be afraid to talk about them, not jump in with how wrong they are. We have to ask their reasons for staying alive, figuring most people aren’t a hundred percent sold on the idea of dying. We have to bring those reasons out and big them up. We have to get an idea of their plan, if they’re thinking vaguely about not being around any more or if they’ve bought tablets ready to swallow or picked out the bridge they’re going from. We have to disrupt the plan with them, agree to get shot of the tablets or find a way to resist the temptation of the bridge if only for a few days. We have to get them to help that knows what it’s doing like we’d get someone to a hospital after they collapse, and we have to follow up and see how they’re doing once the crisis is over.

There are people thinking about suicide. It’s on us to find them and help them. In the meantime, The Samaritans are the Chazza of the Month. Christmas is a rough time for some people, and a bit of your money will give them someone to talk to.

So there I was a few weekends back, minding me own business, spending a reasonably pleasant day in the company of friends, or at least people paid to be friendly towards me on account of how my fame prevents anyone getting too close, when I witnessed what can only be described as a road traffic accident, being as how it was an accident involving traffic that took place on a road. I won’t lie to you: it was full on proper scary.

I can’t say I was paying much attention beforehand, making it more than possible I was entirely to blame. There we were, queuing at a junction along a dual carriageway. I heard a massive screech kind of a sound, then a massive bang sort of a noise, then a massive screech kind of a thing. Then I saw a car spinning towards us. That I did see. Fortunately it stopped a good ten feet away on the other side of the central reservation; far enough away that we were never in any real danger but close enough for the car to say “Psych.” Turns out the spinning car had pulled out across the dual carriageway at about three miles an hour and a car going along at 60 had slammed into it.

It was then we had to make that difficult decision: whether to be bystanders and hope someone else would have balls or ovaries enough to do something while we watched, or pitch in ourselves and be the heroes that were needed so desperately in someone’s time of crisis. It was then I boldly suggested a quick game of Travel Scrabble.

That having been rebuffed, we sprang into action. I vaguely shouted for someone to phone for an ambulance, heroically passing the first possible buck, and bolted out of the car, leapt over the barrier and tore open the door of the formerly spinning car. I assume it looked indescribably cool. I like to imagine it in slow motion, at sunset. Me all swaggering and cool and sweatless, onlookers gasping and aroused, me giving no hint of what was going on towards the back of my trousers. Inside the car I found two very old, very dazed granny types who clearly could have done without this kind of thing. They were both conscious, both breathing and neither appeared to be badly injured or mangled or horribly covered in blood. Still, they needed a spot of help. Fortunately the bluff my bravado had called on my fairly lousy first aid skills didn’t get anyone killed, one of our party being a doctor who got to the car right after me and knew what to ask and where to poke and what not to bend or twist or otherwise molest. Seems the driver had banged her head on the steering wheel, her airbag having had its mind elsewhere, and was bobbing it around like it weighed too much for her. I got in the back seat and held her head up until the ambulance arrived, making sure she didn’t knacker her neck or her spine. She didn’t like that much and it was around that point the social awkwardness kicked in. Ten minutes passes pretty slowly when you’re holding a stranger’s head and she’s all dazed and scared and confused and in pain. I pretty quickly ran out of ways to reassure her and then ran out of basic chat. You’d be surprised by how little we had in common.

Meanwhile my cohorts were out stopping traffic and checking on the driver of the other car and getting their toddlers out of the way without scaring them too badly and arguing with people trying to drive around the debris because even when this kind of thing happens people are still arseholes. It was all fairly chaotic and scary but that’s meddling for you. Luckily it turned out all right. The two granny types got to hospital and were discharged that night, the guy in the other car had nothing wrong with him past the scare he’d got, we all went home feeling awesome and I had a bit of do-gooding to blog about. Meanwhile you’re sat there doing nothing. Maybe you should go learn some first aid if you’ve not done it already, make yourself useful. Learn how to do abdominal thrusts when someone chokes on the brown vegetarian slop you’ve served up. Learn what to do with broken legs when your mother falls down a lift shaft shortly after making her new husband sole beneficiary for her estate. Learn how to resuscitate your Texan billionaire lover after you’ve sexed their heart to near death, should you want to. Learn that type of stuff and use it. Get on it, people, there’s meddling to be done.

Having signed up for a life as a Zero I am duty bound to do good, to right wrongs both large and small, to meddle in events both global and local, and to take credit for any good thing that happens within a four mile radius of me and anywhere else in the world and also throughout history. But even with my in-built awesomeness, even with my devotion to the cause, even with my principal principles well in place, these things can drift. People, it’s time for a do-gooding audit!

I’m doing okay with Fairtrade, having substituted a decent amount of evil-hearted products with their noble Fairtrade equivalents. I’m strict on tea, coffee, sugar, bananas, cereal bars and cocoa powder, a bit patchy with the likes of jam, marmalade, spices and non-banana based fruitage, and lousy with the likes of cereal and clothes. My excuse here is around availability but, if we’re honest, I could track them down with a little effort. There’s work to be done there. Laziness aside, chocolate remains my weak point, both with Fairtrade and with life in general. I crave the lusty brown beast like my grandmother craves cock, and without personal intervention from Nancy Reagan I’m powerless against its charms. I buy Fairtrade chocolate whenever it’s around, made easier by the likes of Dairy Milk and Maltesers, and go for Rainforest Alliance as a back up but if the need’s upon me and I’m facing an only partially-stocked vending machine I’ll go for whatever they’ve got and say balls to Africa and hide in a corner and cram the dirty brown glory block into my face hole. On Fairtrade, then, I’m mostly worse than Hitler.

The Nestlé boycott’s my strong point, my moral Achilles’ rest of body. You’ll recall how Nestlé aggressively markets baby milk formula in countries where the dirty water it gets mixed with can kill and where the price can knacker the world’s poorest people and how it does this in spite of breast milk coming free and breasts being fitted as standard on the bodies of roughly half the adult population of the planet. I’ve not bought anything from them sons of bitches in about six years, not counting the ton of chocolate I bought in the name a particularly immature burn. Even when faced with the vending machine dilemma I steer clear of Nestlé, even though my life is emptier for the absence of Drifters and their chewy goodness, Milky Bars and their creepy child mascots and Yorkies and their tedious gender stereotyped marketing campaigns. Yes yes, full points for me there.

Likewise, I continue to be awesome in the category of vegetarianism, at least in terms of not eating animals. I remain fairly lousy in terms of basic nutrition. Fact is, try as I might, I just can’t give two shits about it. For that I’ll score myself two Linda McCartneys, minus one Heather Mills, resulting in a final score of a PETA volunteer’s exposed vagina.

As for volunteering, I’m a little conflicted. Fundraising for Yaknak, I’ve done a half marathon and a cross country 10k in the past couple of months and bigged up regular donations that now account for more than half its income. It would, of course, be unwise to make direct comparisons with Christ. We all know how that went for John Lennon – who I am also like. However, good as I am there’s something slightly unsatisfying about it all, being as how most of the work is done online, tucked away in Zero Towers rather than out in the world. I felt much more hands on and do-goodery when I was doing those river clean ups but it’s amazing how quickly you get tired of picking up other people’s junk and condoms. Here, I feel, I need to do something new.

Environmentally I’m about middle on the Al Gore/Fox News spectrum. I’ve abandoned public transport for work in favour of some actual reliability and convenience, a sell out so huge John Lydon interrupted the filming of his latest butter advert to give me a telling off. Similarly, I haven’t got around to changing my electricity supply to more expensive renewable energy thanks to colossal student debt, and have dabbled with old, evil washing up liquid after the plant-based stuff proved insufficient for the greasy shit I’ve been cooking. I’ve also got a bit slack around reusable shopping bags, often forgetting to take them with me and having to buy new ones which probably makes them less environmentally friendly than the thinner disposable ones. Worse than all of this, I’ve reverted to old incandescent light bulbs in some of the windowless rooms in Zero Towers, the gloom in winter descending to somewhere around the middle ages. In the plus column, I still recycle like a mutha, still refuse plastic cups at the water cooler, still buy second hand, still compost, still go for sustainable materials when buying stuff, and still avoid veg flown from Uganda when there’s local stuff on offer. I’d say I’ve got a bit of work to do if Al Gore is ever to make me his bride.

So there we are. A spot of awesomeness with a degree of slippage. I need to get more fundamentalist on Fairtrade chocolate, walk with a cocky swagger on behalf of the Nestlé boycott, try and be a slightly better vegetarian to the extent that I give a shit, really pull up my hemp socks on the environment and either do some hands-on volunteering or feel smugger about the stuff I’m doing already. None of which brings us to September’s Charity of the Month. It’s me. Please give generously.